Jim Six: Beware of the Blob

OK, maybe not everything, but certainly a lot of those silly ideas someone had years ago have a good chance of becoming real.

Frankly, I’m still a little peeved that we don’t have the personal jet packs and super-futuristic cars we were promised back in the 1950s.

Still, I suppose we’d have to admit a lot of once was science fiction has, indeed, come to pass.

We have been to the moon, of course — although there are still some who insist that first moon landing was really filmed in a movie studio on earth.

We also have a manned space station zooming around the earth at about 17,500 mph.

While a Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio never became ubiquitous, that idea certainly has long been outpaced by today’s smart phones and Bluetooth devices — allowing us to communicate, surf the Web, take pictures, control machines and devices remotely, and play Farmville and Angry Birds just about anywhere.

But now, it seems, even some of our sci-fi movies are coming true!

Flashback to 1958: Steve McQueen’s first major motion picture had him playing opposite a gooey mass of gelatinous material called “The Blob.” It was a goofy movie with cheesy special effects. It’s a cult classic. But nothing like real life.

Oh, yeah?

Right now, the Hubble Space Telescope has been looking at what an Associated Press story considers “ a mysterious green blob in outer space.”

That’s right, a green blob. And this blob from outer space, scientists now believe, is “strangely alive.”

The outer space blob has a name — Hanny’s Voorwerp. It’s named for the Dutch school teacher who first discovered it in 2007,

I am not losing any sleep over this real blob and don’t think it’s going to be invading us anytime soon. Roughly the size of the Milky Way — the galaxy, not the candy bar — it is 650 million light years away from earth. (A light year is about 6 trillion miles.)

It’s believed Hanny’s Voorwerp — voorwerp is Dutch for object — has been giving birth to stars, some a mere couple of million years old, in places where stars don’t usually form.

The blob is made up of hydrogen gas coming from a CLOSE ENCOUNTER between two galaxies. (Emphasis added, because, well, it sounds too much like that movie about aliens.)

The blob glows with light coming from a nearby quasar, which is, in turn, powered by a black hole.

Of course, I don’t really understand any of this, since I am not a rocket scientist.